Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings show a complex thinker who saw science as a tool for social change, not just an enemy of religion. He sought a balance between science and spirituality, inspired by Gandhi…
Reports of the death of Buddhism in precolonial India were greatly exaggerated. The many Buddhisms promoted by ideologies across the spectrum in modern times came to distinctively shape South Asia.
To have a rational conversation about religious conversions in India, we have to carefully disentangle reason from rhetoric, cleanse key words of their emotive charge, subject arguments to logical…
Despite Tamil Nadu’s history of anti-caste movements, continued reports on the denial of temple entry to Dalits indicate that the space has to come under greater legal and public scrutiny. The state…
Between the 14th and 17th centuries, the states of the Deccan drew on the same resources to base their authority -- the memory of the prestigious Chalukyas maharajas of Kalyana, and the prestige…
The myth of ‘love jihad’ is sustained through widely circulated illustrations of ‘lustful’ Muslim men and ‘victimised’ Hindu women. These images recirculate decades-old calumnies and make invisible…
A comparative study of the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayanis, two sects seen as polar opposites, raises questions on both the superiority of the Hindu reform project during the colonial period and…
Even radical dissenters have experimented within some boundaries. Gandhi played with boundaries themselves in nearly every domain of life — politics, sexuality, culture, knowledge. He was uniquely a…
Complex societal transformations can be assessed through their changing normative structures. One can analyse the different social domains in India by focussing on the key concept of ‘transgression’…
